Atomic-Age Cthulhu: Tales of Mythos Terror in the 1950s

by Robert Price

  Fred burst into Ricky’s living room, wearing a WWI style helmet and carrying a pump-action shotgun, breathlessly warning Ricky that he had heard about an invasion from outer space.

  Outside the twin windows of Stan’s living room, in the night, thunder growled as the storm that had been building for the past few hours broke at last. Two things happened at that instant: Stan’s TV picture filled with snow, turning Ricky and Fred into grainy shadows—drowning out their voices with static—and unseen knives stabbed Stan in both temples. He actually dropped his mostly empty beer bottle to the floor and hunched forward with his palms pressed to the sides of his head. For an irrational moment he wondered if a bolt of lightning had shot through the nearest window and struck him, attracted to the metal plate under his skin.

  Peripherally he saw another flash of lightning outside his windows. The thunder followed only a second later, indicating the storm was already directly overhead; a massive boom that made the walls vibrate. Stan felt as though he were again ducking down in a steaming trench gouged into that hellish Korean battlefield. He pulled his head into his neck, waiting for the shrapnel to hit him, though the plate in his skull was like shrapnel already, bigger than the chunk that had struck him on the battleground.

  He lurched up from his chair somehow, staggered to one open window and then the other, shutting them just as a torrential rain was unleashed upon the city. Crashing down like a Biblical flood in the making. It slammed his windowpanes as if it were an angry, sentient force demanding admission. Stan pulled the shades down, to further shut out that malignant force, before he turned and fell back into the armchair with a groan.

  When Stan managed to lift his head, which seemed to have tripled in weight as if its entire mass were now made of metal, and focused his watery burning eyes, he saw that horizontal bands were now rolling up his TV screen from bottom to top and the snow had intensified, so that Ricky and Fred were even harder to distinguish. Or was that Lucy and Ethel? The two distorted figures were weirdly elongated, gesturing in dripping blurs, black holes that were probably their mouths stretching wide. Snatches of metallic voices could now be heard through the hissing static, but they were incomprehensible…unless that was Lucy and Ethel imitating Martian talk again.

  Another detonation of thunder. The glass in the windows rattled. The plate in his forehead felt like it was rattling in its frame, as well. Stan moaned again.

  The tinny, garbled voices were like ice picks in his ears, fingernails on the chalk of his spinal column. He braced his hands on the grips of his armchair and once more shoved himself to his feet. As he stumbled to his TV, the static jumped louder in a crackling burst and the horizontal bands quickened to a flutter. He took hold of the left antenna of the rabbit ears, changing its position slightly. The rasp of static diminished to a milder hiss of white noise, the unsettling voices gone. He nudged the right ear next, and the horizontal bands slowed. As he stepped back to look down at the screen, the horizontal bands stopped altogether and the veil of electromagnetic interference lessened dramatically. Stan realized then that his proximity to the TV made the reception worse, somehow, so he backed away further and reseated himself to gauge the results. Sure enough, the snow cleared to the extent that he could view the television’s images pretty clearly, and though there was still no proper sound, the fizzing static was just a whisper, almost lost under the pummeling of the rain outside.

  I Love Lucy must have ended, however, and another program begun. Whatever this show was, it was not centered on some cheap interior set, some painted outdoors backdrop. The backdrop appeared to be an actual city, but a city half reduced to its constituent parts, its components, its bricks and blocks. Rubble and rebar, wafting smoke, and Stan was reminded of the destruction in Seoul or Pyongyang or Wonsan. Was it a documentary, then? An exposé on war? But which? Only technology differentiated wars. His war? Earlier, maybe…WWII? A lot looked flattened there in the background. Nagasaki, then? Hiroshima? Stan didn’t know that this year—the same year the war in Korea had ended—the US had proposed a plan called Operation Vulture, in support of the French in Indochina, that if it hadn’t been rejected would have allowed for the use of three atom bombs dropped on Viet Minh positions. Otherwise, he might well have believed this to be the aftermath.

  In the middle distance, a dirty white sheet fluttered by on the wind, dragging its tattered ends across the floor of pulverized debris. Or maybe it was a torn-away canvas awning, or a futile white flag of surrender.

  Yet another rumble of thunder, like a freight train barreling through the apartment overhead. The plate in his head hummed as though an electric current were being passed straight into it. And—as if the lightning storm, the electrical field of his own body, and the television were all connected—the TV screen went all snowy once more, but this time in a negative image of static: a field of seething black sparkling with glitter, like time-lapse photography of galaxies of stars being born and expiring in the briefest flicker of existence.

  When the avalanche roar of thunder had passed, and the vibrating hum in his head had receded, the screen cleared to show a different angle of perhaps the same destroyed city. A church steeple stood in puny defiance, but the rest of it was a carbonized shell. There was still a faint degree of snow to the reception—yet then Stan realized it was not interference, but actual snow drifting down on the blasted city. No…no…not quite. It was a lazy fall of ash, sprinkling across the city from the churning black ceiling of cloud that capped the sky like an encroachment of deep space itself. Inky space pressing down on the atmosphere of the Earth, crushing the air, the friction of these opposing forces burning the oxygen itself into ash.

  Several more ragged-ended sheets came fluttering along on the wind, one further in the distance than the other. The funny thing was, the plumes of smoke rising into the air everywhere from the piles of shattered rubble were being carried in the opposite direction.

  The scene was depressing Stan on top of his pain, overcoming his curiosity about the nature of the program. He had learned all he wanted to learn about war—any war—firsthand. Before some orphaned tot with her face smeared in soot could stagger dazedly into the frame, Stan took advantage of the abatement of his suffering to get up from the chair yet again and reach out to turn the TV’s dial to a different channel.

  The next channel revealed a new image, but this image was a third angle of the same demolished city. He clicked to another channel. Another view of the same subject matter. Click…click…click. Only the perspective changed; the annihilation remained the same. In fact, Stan was finding that channels not normally active were receiving the transmission. He made several full circuits of the dial, as if futilely trying to crack a safe, and found that every channel featured the broadcast…only the point of view altering, as if he were receiving live feeds from a dozen or more TV cameras dispersed around the city.

  Something of great import had happened, then…but where, exactly? And what, exactly?

  When he’d drawn close to the TV to change the channel, his nearness had again caused the reception to grow grainy and noisy with static, but the various city scenes were only obscured, not fully erased. He gave both rabbit ears a few hard, impatient shifts that lessened the video and audio interference, but it wasn’t until he retreated to the armchair that the picture was clarified and the sound went mostly quiet. He had settled on one channel arbitrarily: the one that showed the blackened church steeple. He had been tempted to turn the set off altogether, but he had to know what was going on. Whatever it was, it was obviously of profound significance. Would some announcer finally come on to explain what the hell he was witnessing? Along came yet another bed sheet (had an exploded laundry dispersed its contents across the city?), blowing into the scene, but it stopped in the middle of the street…and hovered there. And hovered there. Hovered there, with its torn ends stirring as if it swam in place. Its surface rippled or pulsed or undulated, and the sheet was not so much dirty white as cloudy gray, with the fain
test metallic sheen. As he stared fixedly at it, the floating shroud raised itself up a little, its membrane appearing to stiffen with alertness, and Stan realized then it was not a bed sheet or any other inanimate object, but some kind of living thing, however primitive its protoplasmic amoeba’s body; a sentience manifested as a raw scrap of primal tissue. And it had stiffened in alertness because, just as Stan had understood on some deep intuitive level what he was seeing, the thing had seemed to understand him as well. It was seeing him. Or sensing him, in whatever manner the thing perceived the material world. And even as Stan recognized that it was aware of him, the tattered membrane started moving directly at the camera. Directly toward his screen. Toward him.

  Stan launched himself forward, thrusting his arm out. The membrane was sailing at him quickly as well, as if trying to intercept him before he could touch the dial. As he came at the screen the reception worsened, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough to blot out what he was seeing.

  Stan realized he had given out a wild cry, a blurt of panic, but before the thing could reach the thin windowpane of his screen—the flimsy bubble film that separated the two of them—his fingers found the dial and snapped it.

  Another channel. On this street, none of those hovering, parachute-like bodies. Blending together, ash and popping electrical bugs filled the smoky air. The static roared like a raging fire.

  Stan fell to his knees, his fingers still gripping the dial in case another of the apparitions came out from a shadowed alley of the ruins. He heaved with gasps, shaking badly, feeling as if he had just emerged alive from a firefight…but most of all he felt pierced by the eyeless, faceless creature that had spotted him, as if its awesome sentience had burned a hole straight through him. A lingering aftertaste of that inhuman, alien sentience seemed imprinted on the metal plate in his skull as if it were photographic film. Had the plate attracted that mental force, or had it in fact shielded him from it? If not for that little chunk of armor, might the creature have burrowed into his mind to consume it, or replace it with its own?

  Through his shell-shocked terror and confusion, Stan belatedly registered a few details about this particular scene that had escaped him on his previous circuits of the dial. Framed within the TV screen was a downed camouflaged helicopter, crumpled by the side of the street. Despite the damage it had sustained, it was clearly unlike any such machine Stan had ever seen; certainly nothing like the choppers he’d known in Korea, such as the Sikorsky H-19. And now he more consciously took in the charred and gutted bodies of cars he’d only noticed peripherally before. Scattered everywhere, often half buried, many crushed, some upside-down—as if they had been borne high aloft on fiery winds before plummeting back to Earth. Despite their deformities, they too were of styles unfamiliar to him. Smaller than any of the big, solid American cars he had helped construct at Plymouth. More compact, more toy-like, more…futuristic.

  He had another of his strange intuitions. This prescient instinct told him that he wasn’t witnessing a catastrophic event occurring now at some distant location of the Earth. He was witnessing a catastrophic event occurring at some as-yet distant location in time.

  But all these considerations had distracted him. He’d let down his guard. Suddenly, there it was: another of the jellyfish-things, appearing like an extrusion of ectoplasm from behind the crashed helicopter itself. It might even be the same entity that had tried to reach him before.

  “I’m going crazy,” Stan muttered to himself, quaking all over and close to tears. “It’s battle fatigue, that’s all. And I drink too much. And that shrapnel scrambled my brains. I’m still watching I Love Lucy and I just don’t know it.”

  But he had made a mistake in speaking to himself aloud. The creature had heard him; he could tell by the way it lifted a little and its membrane stretched more taut. It stopped drifting, spun to face him facelessly, and as before began whisking toward him.

  Click! The next channel. Stan was whimpering. In this shot, a scorched tank rested in the center of the road. Again, it was some impressive make that had yet to be invented. Not impressive enough, though, to have defended the city from the threat that had come. But where were the bodies of the soldiers, the citizens? What had they done with the bodies?

  There, at the end of the street: three of the jellyfish glided into view, pale against the black smoke, almost glowing. Now four of the creatures…five. They hadn’t noticed him yet.

  Stan had seen enough. Enough. He reached his hand to another knob, and turned the RCA Craig’s power off.

  But the image didn’t vanish. The static kept rasping. The only thing he accomplished was to make those five phantoms at the end of the street whirl around in the air to direct their attention his way.

  Stan jumped to his feet and darted to the wall near his two windows, where the set’s power cord was plugged into an outlet. He jerked it out of the wall socket, then turned and looked back at the screen.

  Because he had moved away from the set, the reception had improved. That was the only change. The black and white vision of destruction remained, with the five entities approaching him steadily.

  He thought of fetching a hammer and smashing that seventeen-inch screen. But what if that only opened the window? Let them into his reality, here in the past?

  A flash of light outside his windows, like a bomb igniting. There were several beats of delay before the accompanying peal of thunder. The storm was moving along, then. Good…good! It was the storm that had opened the way, wasn’t it? Some triangular relationship between the electrical storm, the TV, and the conductive metal hatch bolted so close to his brain. If that triangle could be broken again, that’s what would really cut the power to his set.

  But he was afraid the storm wouldn’t pass in time. The five entities would have reached him by then. He had to take more decisive action. He was a soldier, damn it. The war was not yet over; hell, it was a long way from beginning. Maybe he could change the outcome—keep the invaders from entering his world right here and now.

  So Stan rushed to meet the enemy. Charged his TV as if to hurl himself onto a sprung hand grenade to save his comrades. What he had learned was that he could disrupt the signal; it was probably the steel plate that was doing it. So he snatched up his TV antenna and bent his head forward and pressed his indented cranium against the twisted metal helix that jutted from the black orb between the two rabbit ears.

  That did it, all right. The surge in static was almost deafening. The TV screen turned entirely to snow, as if a sandstorm were raging inside that little box. He could not see the creatures, and they could not see him. Right? The snow formed an obstruction, a wall…and blocked this way, the invaders could come no closer.

  Right?

  He closed his eyes, squeezed them tight, and held his position until the lightning storm could truly pass, to cinch the deal. Held his ground like a good soldier.

  Stan opened his eyes at last, and what enfolded before him as his lids lifted was like watching an idle TV power up for the day’s first viewing.

  Static still sizzled in his ears, but maybe that was flames crackling, because fires still burned here and there all around him, sending smoke twisting into the air. He looked above him, making an inarticulate sound deep in his throat, and saw the black clouds that formed a near-solid cataract across the sky, as if to encase and trap this insignificant little world, an insect preserved in amber. Falling ash alighted on the skin of his upturned face and came to rest delicately on his eyelashes. Was it his imagination that the ashes smelled of death, as if they were the thinnest parings of human flesh?

  Looking down again, he whipped around to glance this way, then that. He was standing out in the open in the middle of the street. Then he raised his hands in front of his face and examined them. His skin was utterly colorless. The world here was black and white.

  A tiny disturbance in the air like an unheard whisper or rustle reached him, and he whirled again to look down an intersecting street. Hovering toward him was
something like a burial shroud, a winding sheet instead of a bed sheet, carried on the wind. But there was no wind.

  He spun to look down an alley on his other side, from which two more of the airborne membranes were emerging. The enemy forces were advancing on him from every direction. And that was when Stan had one more of those intuitions that the creatures themselves, perhaps, were putting into his head, with its special receiver. This intuition told him these were not so many individual beings, but individual cells—numbering in the millions, the billions—that in their totality constituted one great, single entity. God was too small, too humble a word for it.

  “I’m going crazy,” Stan sobbed loudly, as if protesting to the nearing cells themselves. “It’s battle fatigue. And I drink too much. And that shrapnel messed up my brain. I’m still watching I Love Lucy but I just…don’t…know it!”

  He dropped to his knees there in the middle of the street as the circle around him tightened, as if he were the center of some TV test pattern…the hub of a complex geometry…an integral figure to complete an unfathomable equation…a vacuum tube to be inserted into a faulty television set. They had lured him. They needed him. And he would, thankfully, never know why. It was beyond human comprehension.

  Stan threw back his head, palms pressed hard to his temples, and wailed to the crushing sky. The encircling entities converged onhim…making it time to cut away for a commercial break.

  UNAMERICAN

  BY CODY GOODFELLOW

  The tenant in #9 at the Tahitian Arms had a Doberman named Adolf. It barked and howled all night long, its owner said, ever since it stopped doing live sex shows for Howard Hughes at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The tenant in #7 was an old Borscht Belt ventriloquist recovering from a stroke. His dummy shrieked all night long at the dog, taunting it in Yiddish until it attacked the bedroom wall of #8, where Hugh Talbot lay on his narrow twin bed while other people slept.